Now's The Time To Toughen Up: The Brand-New Army Workout

Physical training, at its deepest roots, originated as a method to improve the fitness of a nation’s military. Optimal training methods are always evolving as innovative information continues to become available via the hard work of research communities and practical evidence from the coaches working in the trenches. In this exclusive AskMen interview, Major General Richard C. Longo, the man charged with designing and implementing the Physical Readiness Tests for the entire U.S. Army, reveals recent changes to exactly how the Army physically prepares and assesses preparedness for today’s soldier.

Major General Longo, why don’t we kick things off by having you tell us about your position in the Army.

Major General Richard C. Longo (RL): I am the deputy commanding general for Initial Military Training in the U.S. Army. What that means is I’m responsible for all the new privates and officers that come into the Army to ensure that their training is both relevant and rigorous.

Underneath those responsibilities, I’m also responsible for the Army Physical Fitness School. Those are the people that do all of the doctrine-writing and thinking with regards to our Army’s PT program and testing.

Recently you’ve made some significant changes to the Army’s Physical Readiness Tests. What prompted you to change things up?

RL: We’ve had a PT test that’s been in the Army for over 30 years now. It’s a very simple, three-event test measuring push-ups, sit-ups and a two-mile run. It was an improvement over the previous test because all you needed was ground to push-up against, sit-up from and run on. It cost nothing to conduct a test, and in 1980, when this came out, this was really important to our Army.

So this test worked pretty well for about 30 years, but what we found out through combat over the last 10 years is that we weren’t necessarily assessing the right things, meaning the things we ask our soldiers to do in combat. The old tests do give you a pretty good assessment of an individual’s fitness; they’re decent. But what we’re finding is that in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places where our soldiers are deployed, they’re being asked to demonstrate more mobility and agility, and more lower-body power as they climb over fences and carry heavy things. But our PT programming and our PT testing wasn’t really getting at that.

So the first thing we did was change the way we trained. We oriented the training more toward the physical requirements of the soldier in combat. The next step, what we’re in the midst of now, is assessing a PT test that measures their ability to not just do PT, but do perform the tasks we ask of them in combat. It’s the first time we’ve tied together the testing and the requirements of a soldier in combat. Combat is not a sport, and I don’t mean to imply that it is, but it’s very much like a sport in that the preparation needs to match the demands of the activity, so that’s the transition that we’ve made.

Our soldiers will train for the PT test because of the benefits associated with doing well (e.g. promotions, awards, recognition). The change now is that as soldiers train for this test, they’re also training for combat, which is a great thing.

You mentioned that the old tests and PT may not be as applicable to the demands of today’s soldiers. Can you give us some insight into the current demands of soldiers that may not have been emphasized adequately in the old testing and PT protocols?

RL: In the past, we thought that as long as our soldiers were generally fit that they were prepared for combat. What we found is that some of these soldiers demonstrated this general fitness or endurance, but when they were carrying an 80-lb rucksack at 10,000 feet in Afghanistan, they weren’t able to perform as we expected. Or if they’re walking through the streets of Tikrit in Iraq and are required to continuously climb over fences and rock and mud walls that they didn’t have the lower body strength to do that. And when they’re in the midst of combat, the requirement for some level of mobility and agility were two things that we didn’t even measure. The gaps were in the ability to run back and forth very quickly and demonstrate more of an anaerobic endurance than aerobic endurance, so that’s what we focused the training on.